This initiative is part of BOV’s 50th anniversary, exhibiting the bank’s collection of modern and contemporary artworks 

Preserving and promoting the treasured work of those in the artistic, creative, and architectural sectors has always been one of Bank of Valletta’s main focus in its support to the community.

This year the bank is celebrating its 50th year of operations, and as part of the celebrations, an art exhibition is being held to commemorate and showcase the bank’s collection of modern and contemporary artworks.

Entitled “inwaħħdu xbihat minn kullimkien”, taken from Achille Mizzi’s poem Skorfon (Il-Kantiku tad-Demm), the exhibition draws its imprint from the nature of the collection and the way it evolved over the years.

Bank of Valletta’s collection is, by Maltese standards, a very large one, counting over 900 pieces. It is a collection that has evolved rather randomly, with works that were primarily meant to decorate reception areas, offices, and boardroom walls. They largely date from the 1970s to the early 2000s and most works were purchased directly from the artists.

Norbert Francis Attard – Walls That Don’t Exist 1979

In its vastness, Bank of Valletta’s collection provides a snapshot of Maltese art, with works by both prominent and less well known artists. The works reflect the realities of the Maltese art scene and vary in style and significance. The collection is largely composed of landscape paintings and abstract works of small to medium size. They are mostly executed in traditional media, without breaking much into experimental forms.

During the selection process for inwaħħdu xbihat minn kullimkien, curator Keith Sciberras identified and highlighted the work of the main protagonists in a curated display that mirrors much of the artistic concerns and production of modern and contemporary art in Malta. In their attempt to embrace international references, the works on display dialogue, albeit sometimes hesitantly, with artistic realities primarily in England, Italy, and France, where several of these Maltese artists trained or studied.

Pawl Carbonaro – Marsalforn 2001

The 54 works on exhibit display considerable visual coherence, but at the same time underline individual interests and idioms. The concerns here are mainly with aesthetics and rendering and notably do not engage in depth with commentary on political and social controversies and debates of that time. Colour, light, form, and expression unite (iwaħħdu) this exhibition. In many ways, this reflects the general character of Maltese modern art.

Anton Inglott – Old Parish Church, Birkirkara

The exhibition flows through three main chapters, or rooms, set out in the Camerone of MUZA – the National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta.  They are respectively dedicated to works on paper (Karta/Paper), landscapes (Art/Earth), and abstract works (Ħsieb/Mind). A smaller, but significant, fourth room is dominated by one single, large figurative work by Anton Calleja.

Works by Victor Pasmore, the prominent English abstract artist who settled in Malta in the mid-1960s, Caesar Attard, Norbert Attard, and others, mark the section entitled Karta. This is a section that dialogues with the act of marking paper through print and engages with the way artists handled technique and imagery, embracing both old-established and new printing techniques.

The key work here is Pasmore’s profound exploration of abstraction through the simplicity of lines and shape in his 1971 screen print entitled Linear Development A. This selection, set in the opening room, is a tribute to his impact on the Maltese artists who moved closer to abstraction in the late 1960s and 1970s. It is, however, not only about abstraction.

The work of reference of the “Art” section is Antoine Camilleri’s deeply emotive Ix-xemx titla’ u tinżel, a work that has a manifest ‘Malteseness’ to it, both in its medium (Maltese earth) and imagery.  Other emotively charged or abstracted landscape renditions (with works by Carmelo Mangion, Emvin Cremona, Esprit Barthet, Isabelle Borg, and others) are in dialogue with more naturalist paintings of the Maltese landscape (Anton Inglott, George Fenech, Joseph Mallia and others), exhibited in a salon manner. This is essentially an eclectic section, kept together, or united (inwaħħda), by the theme of the works.

Frank Portelli – Contours No. CXXVI: The Holy Shroud 1988

In the “ħsieb” room, the principal artwork is Alfred Chircop’s deeply spiritual Untitled, displayed alongside works by the protagonists of abstraction in Malta, namely Frank Portelli, Gabriel Caruana, Paul Carbonaro, Vince Briffa, and others.  This fascinating section, where sizeable works provide both contrast and points of contact, underlines the impact of the many forms and styles of abstract art that conditioned the Maltese scene during the final decades of the twentieth century.

The fourth section displays the largest painting in the show, namely Anthony Calleja’s Walks of Life, an ambitious four-metre-wide work with 12 full-length figures executed with admirable precision. In many ways, this painting stands as a tribute to Malta’s long-standing tradition of figurative art.

inwaħħdu xbihat minn kullimkien also embraces art with poetry, in a dialogue that mirrors the ‘ut pictura poesis’ tradition, where poetry and painting engage in a dialogue or friendly ‘paragon’. The poet of choice for this element of the exhibition is Achille Mizzi, and extracts from his work, selected by Immanuel Mifsud, accompany the titles of exhibition rooms.

With so many different elements coming together under one roof, this exhibition mirrors the trajectory of Bank of Valletta over the past 50 years, with the different elements of the art on exhibit forming a unified whole, just as the different aspects of the financial sectors merge to form the Bank of Valletta we know today.

This article was first published in the BOV 50th Anniversary magazine.